SPEED

What do you call a memoir that isn’t? In This Is Not a Memoir, Janette Parris incisively narrates a journey through lost high street landmarks of East and South London in a series of detailed artworks blending map, archive and anecdote with deadpan humour. Part graphic novel, part recollection, and accompanied by an in-conversation between Janette Parris and Gilane Tawadros, this is an intimate exploration of what it means to have ownership of public space, from Wimpy to Woolworth’s via Canning Town. And somewhere in the gaps, in absent moments caught gazing at the sky or a kerbside, an impression of a life emerges–or is that just what she wants you to think?

“This book by Janette Parris tells a deflationary yet expressive coming-of-age story in the East End of London. While it may seem fun and superficial, its considerable power lies in how it moves through memories and moments in a witty and light-footed way presented as a roman-à-clef. This Is Not a Memoir is particular in the way it conjures a world of the 1970s and 1980s that is lost to most of London, yet still resonates with what it means to grow up as a working class young woman who ends up at art school and becomes an artist. It is a brave book to make, but one that will be remembered.”
— Rachel Garfield, artist, Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art and author of Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s (2021)

Janette Parris is an artist who investigates the contemporary urban experience, using narrative, humour and popular formats including soap opera, stand-up comedy, musical theatre, pop mu-sic, cartoons, comics and animation. Parris has exhibited widely nationally and internationally for 25 years at spaces including TATE, The New Art Gallery Walsall, ICA, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hay-ward Gallery Touring, Art on the Underground and Royal Academy of Arts.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

Aleen Solari’s work is shaped profoundly by insights into various subcultures. These insights are partly drawn from her own experiences, partly borrowed from members of certain scenes who she invites to be part of her work. Her sculptural practice moves in and out of life within these groups, and is full of codes and quotations from antifa members, football hooligans, bored youth clubs or those embedded in neonazi networks. 

Direct Into Chaos is a book that dives deep into these worlds, shape-shifting between fiction, documentation and artwork. In ghost written texts, Solari fictionalises her own artistic biography, morphing interviews with football hooligans who had their phones tapped by the police, into a dream world where they receive generous compensation for years lived under surveillance. 

In this publication – in a chaotic, dreamlike state of mind – fiction and documentation, art and activism meld into something new.
Aleen Solari is an artist who lives in Hamburg, Germany

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

In 2015, Jacob finds himself wandering the streets, swamps and cemeteries of New Orleans. Through his search for a man named Ignatius, 'O Fortuna' tells the story of his attempt to make a film. We discover the city’s unique atmosphere and meet a bizarre cast of characters who assist Jacob with his uncertain attempts at shooting scenes of DAT LIKWID LAND.

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.

An early progenitor of the artist's book genre, Warja Honegger-Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1913. She worked as an illustrator for the magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958, and moved to New York shortly thereafter where she began a wonderful series of artist's books. 
These books were published between 1962 and 1971, an exceptionally ripe time for artists to turn to the bookform, a time when the most often cited "first" artist's book also appeared, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) by Ed Ruscha.

All of Honegger-Lavater's books are made using the accordion-fold binding. Her aesthetic has been aptly described as "very clean, very Swiss." Each book tells a story, sequentially, like traditional books, but varying from them by rarely using words. Instead she chooses a symbol to represent, for example, a character, as in the red dot standing in for Red Riding Hood in Little Red Riding Hood.

TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Painting Photographs, a new book by Creative Growth Art Center artist Alice Wong. Wong's bold interpretation of vintage vernacular photographs breathes new life into family album kitsch and cliché shots of plants and landscapes, transforming them into a hyper-color plane of vivid abstraction. Using paint markers to enhance and obscure the formal qualities of appropriated imagery, Wong's hand brings energy to each underlying image, recalibrating the viewer's eye and sparking appreciation for otherwise still compositions. With fluid mark-making and a striking approach to color-blocking, Wong's craft merges with the photographic process to create work that feels at once of times past and completely contemporary.

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

The text by Hiller navigates the boundaries between art, anthropology and psychoanalysis in relation to her installation at the Freud Museum in 1994 titled At the Freud Museum. Accompanying images included throughout from Book Works UK archive, the commissioner of the artwork and talks that this text is edited from.